A new potential source of fuel, buried deep underground ~ methane gas created in lab with rocks only

The Wichita Eagle ^ | Thu, Sep. 23, 2004 | BETSY MASON Knight Ridder Newspapers

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. - (KRT) - Scientists may have discovered a new source of fuel far below the Earth's surface.

Fossil fuels get their name from the ancient plants and animals that decayed to form oil, gas and coal. But now scientists have created methane gas without any biological matter, suggesting that the fossil fuel supply may not be entirely dependent on fossils after all.

The research opens up the possibility of a vast reservoir of methane gas more than 60 miles below the Earth's surface and could also help scientists hunting for signs of life on Mars and other planets.

"There has been a lot of speculation about the origin of natural gas and oil," said Laurence Fried, a computational chemist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and a member of the research team.

Most scientists believe fossil fuels are the product of organic material buried long ago, cooked by the Earth's interior heat and trapped within rock layers beneath the surface. But a small group has long supported the theory that oil and gas could result from chemical reactions involving common minerals deep within the Earth.

To test the idea, scientists at the Carnegie Institute of Washington used a device called a diamond anvil cell to subject marble, iron oxide and water to the extreme pressures and temperatures typical between 60 and 120 miles below the Earth's surface.

The mixture reached temperatures greater than 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures between 50,000 and 110,000 times greater than at the Earth's surface. Using cutting-edge X-ray imaging techniques, the scientists found that methane bubbles had formed.

The research was published last week in the online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

A team of researchers at the Livermore lab led by Fried used their knowledge of the intense heat and pressure involved with nuclear weapons to understand how gas could form under such high pressures. Normally pressure keeps gas from being released, like carbonated soda under pressure in a sealed bottle. The carbonation isn't released until the pressure drops when the bottle is opened.

Fried's team calculated that the methane bubbles were the result of a "phase separation," similar to the way oil separates from water in salad dressing.

"We haven't proven that there are large reserves of methane in the Earth's mantle, but we've shown that the chemical reactions are possible," said Fried.

And even if the gas is there, concentrated in vast oceanlike reservoirs, tapping into it is well beyond today's technological capabilities. Never mind that the current typical oil and gas wells don't penetrate much farther than six miles into the Earth's crust - at depths of 60 miles or more, the solid crust gives way to a semisolid region known as the mantle where rock is so hot that it is soft enough to flow very slowly.

Even if drilling to that depth were possible, keeping the hole opened once the drill is removed presents another challenge.

"It would have to be some sort of heroic effort," said Fried. "But it's amazing how fast problems are solved."

Beyond the potential for a virtually limitless supply of fuel, the findings have implications for the hunt for life on other planets.

If methane gas was always the product of biological matter, then detecting methane in the atmosphere of another planet would be a sure sign that some sort of life form had existed there at some point, said geologist Barbara Sherwood Lollar of the University of Toronto.

But since the new experiment has shown that the creation of methane from completely nonbiological materials is at least possible, the discovery in March of methane on Mars can't be taken as a smoking gun that life was present there.

On the other hand, the presence of a lot of hydrocarbons at depth could allow microbial communities to thrive. "It could provide them with the energy they need to subsist since they can't use photosynthesis deep below the surface," Lollar said.

Microbes have been discovered deep in the Earth's crust, and Lollar is working with NASA to determine how these organisms survive so they know what to look for when studying the subsurface of Mars.

"Now that we understand that life subsists deeper in the crust on Earth, they realize they should be looking deeper on Mars," she said.

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[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Methane From Marble:  An Abiogenic Source of Hydrocarbons in the Earth's Deep Interior?

Methane gas has been synthesized from wustite, calcite and water at high temperatures and pressures in the diamond anvil cell, demonstrating abiogenic pathways for the formation of hydrocarbons in the Earth's deep interior. Bubbles formed in the mixture (bottom, left and near the center in the photomicrograph above) upon decompression to 0.5 GPa after laser heating at 5.7 GPa give a Raman spectrum consistent with the formation of methane.  For more information, and to download a reprint of the paper [Scott, H., et al., Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 101, 14023-14026 (2004)], see the links

,a href=http://cdac.ciw.edu/methane_marble.html>A Center of Excellence for High Pressure Science and Technology

[FreedomCalls]

Interesting scientific bump.

[Darkwolf377]

Set up at pipe system at DNC HQ or the Kennedy compound, all the methane you'll ever need.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

ROFL!

[RichInOC]

Why would we need to mess around with rocks when we know perfectly well that beans are a renewable resource?

[BearCub]

Why would we need to mess around with rocks when we know perfectly well that beans are a renewable resource?

LOL

I think it's the collection issues that pose a problem. I mean, you can't really drive around in a methane-powered car with six bubbas in the trunk chowing on chili. I don't even wanna think about how the gas gets from, um, there to the engine.

[Restorer]

Highly cool! (Or, actually, I guess, highly hot.)

Thanks for posting.

[prisoner6]

Thanks for the post, E_A_T_B. Great news. Can't wait to show this to one of my friends who insists we are going to be out of energy within a few years. When I mentioned this before he shot back there had been no positive results from any experiments.

'Til now! hehehehehehe!

prisoner6

[Jackson Brown]

Fossil fuels get their name from the ancient plants and animals that decayed to form oil, gas and coal. But now scientists have created methane gas without any biological matter, suggesting that the fossil fuel supply may not be entirely dependent on fossils after all.

...or dependent on fossils at all! Thomas Gold has suffered a lot of derision from the "end of oil industry". Maybe this will help rehabilitate this man's work!

Hydrocarbon Fuels Aren't Fossils

by Paul Sheridan

---

The Deep Hot Biosphere
Thomas Gold
New York: Copernicus, 1999
Hardcover, 235 pp., $27.00

---

"Gold's theories are always original, always important, usually controversial - and usually right. It is my belief, based on 50 years of observation of Gold as a friend and colleague, that the deep hot biosphere is all of the above: original, important, controversial - and right."
- From the Foreword by Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton


The Deep Hot Biosphere is a culmination of more than 50 years of the life of its remarkable author, astrophysicist Thomas Gold, of Cornell University. Gold was a founding director for the Cornell University Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, chairman of Cornell's Department of Astronomy, and is the author of more than 280 papers in the areas of cosmology, zoology, physics, and astronomy.

Gold's thesis in The Deep Hot Biosphere is simple: Hydrocarbons have been in existence since the earliest times of the universe, and are part of the process of planetary formation. Their constituents, hydrogen and carbon, originated in the "primordial soup" from which Earth was formed. Earth's methane and petroleum, Gold says, are abiogenic - without biological origin.

Contrary to the currently promoted explanation, Cold says that hydrocarbons did not dissociate during these early times because of high temperatures of planet formation, as theorists claim. Current geological science, he shows, affirms that the temperatures were not high enough, especially when depth-related pressures are taken into account.

Gold contends that hydrocarbon sources can be found at great depths below the surface, not a few miles, but a few hundred miles. The deep-Earth sources of hydrocarbons are still working to this day, pumping tons of petroleum and methane gas up through the deep Earth's cracks and pores to the shallow sedimentary levels. It is here that drilling rigs access the upwelling that has been vertically dammed into reservoirs, Gold says. Hydrocarbons did not come from rotting prehistoric plants; they were here a few billion years before life occurred.
[SNIP]

Rest at http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/INGLES-2/FossilFuels.html

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

It was a lab demostration project.

[RichInOC]

Yeah, I guess you do have a point there...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks for your post.

[farmfriend]

Rights, farms, environment ping.
Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.
I don't get offended if you want to be removed.

[montag813]

An even Larger source of Methane has been discovered in THIS man's couch cushions...

[Carry_Okie]

If methane gas was always the product of biological matter, then detecting methane in the atmosphere of another planet would be a sure sign that some sort of life form had existed there at some point, said geologist Barbara Sherwood Lollar of the University of Toronto.

Now there's a stretch.

[chuckles]

I have often said that if oil was from organic matter only, then why do we find it as much as 20 miles deep? Oil is everywhere, on land and the oceans. It is almost always found in rock formations. The dead and dying organic stuff would have to make its way down 20 miles through solid rock?

Naaaah! We're still guessing.

[Syncro]

I would not bet even one dollar

On a theory by a broad named Lollar

[Carry_Okie]

There was a young post-doc named Lollar,
Who got a touch hot neath the collar,
She bantered bout gases,
As thick as molasses,
Cuz burnin' it makes people holler!